World Anti- Doping Agency calls on the football authorities to do more to combat doping

The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has called on football and tennis to do
more to combat doping, including conducting a greater number of tests for
the blood-booster EPO and using athlete biological passports to monitor the
blood profiles of ­players.

Call for action: last week, Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said he feared doping was rife in football.Photo: AFP

Last week, Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger said he feared doping was rife in football following claims by a former president of Real Sociedad that players at the Spanish club had been given performance-enhancing drugs over a six-year period.

Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, who is on trial in Madrid, is also alleged to have supplied footballers with drugs, along with cyclists and track and field athletes.

Meanwhile, several leading tennis players, including Andy Murray and Roger Federer, have called for more frequent blood tests to flush out drug cheats. Federer claimed he was now being tested less often than he was in the early part of his career.

Speaking at a symposium in London yesterday, Wada president John Fahey said: “I saw some examples recently, in tennis, where senior players were saying they were not tested terribly regularly. I would say tennis can do more, and football can do more.”

Under Fifa rules, there is only limited blood-testing in football, while players’ urine samples are often ­subject only to partial analysis.

According to Wada, football is one of a number of sports that frequently fail to check for EPO when testing samples, even though it is one of the more frequently abused substances in world sport because of its endurance-enhancing properties.

“I simply say this about football: they are not testing enough for EPO,” Fahey said. “They can do more and we encourage them to do more.”

David Howman, the director general of Wada, said the lack of EPO testing was not confined to football.

“In the last few years, too few of the samples are analysed for EPO. In 2010, there were 36 [positive] cases of EPO. In 2011 there were 47. That doesn’t hold water with 260,000 samples going to laboratories.

“Many countries and many sports didn’t think they had a problem with EPO and so they weren’t going to check for it. That situation has to be altered.”

Athlete biological passports have become the latest weapon in the fight against doping, with several cyclists and track and field athletes receiving bans on the basis of spikes or abnormalities in their blood profile. But the majority of sports, including football and tennis, have yet to establish a wide-ranging passport programme.

Fahey said: “While testing is a good deterrent factor and may be an effective way of catching people, I would argue the athlete biological passport is a very effective tool. Why isn’t football using it?”

Fahey, whose six-year term ends this year, admitted his organisation had never been busier after a spate of drug scandals in recent months.

Following the lurid exposé of Lance Armstrong’s life of cheating by the United States Anti-Doping Agency, Australia was rocked last week by an Australian Crime Commission report that found evidence of widespread doping in rugby league and Australian Rules football with links to the criminal underworld.

Fahey added: “I have no qualms in saying that sport has to take more responsibility for what is going on within its boundaries, and the Armstrong case has shown this with particular clarity .

“Sport needs to recognise that every time there is an inept response from the sports administrators to doping – as we have seen from cycling over the years – the reputation of sport across the world suffers as a result.”